New Public Website for USMAI Library Consortium

Chuck Thomas, executive director of the University System of Maryland & Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) Library Consortium approached DSS last summer with a request for development of a new public website for USMAI. The SSDR and CLAS teams worked together with Chuck this last Fall to implement the new website which is now available at http://usmai.org .

We have been running a USMAI staff site using Drupal for some time and decided to leverage the existing site in creation of the new site. Drupal has a multi-site feature with multiple configuration options and we chose to use a single codebase with separate databases and separate themes. We used the existing staff site theme as the base for the new public site theme.

We took this opportunity to update our service and support model to match the new DSS organization. Since the existing USMAI staff site and the new USMAI public site are both consortial applications it made sense to transfer frontline support to the CLAS team, which has now been done after several rounds of basic Drupal training. Also the development work provided by SSDR was charged back to USMAI using on at-cost, fee-for-service model. SSDR has been logging all hours worked using Jira and made heavy use of Jira to track the work and generate our invoices. Periodic updates were also provided and feedback was gathered to make sure the project was delivered according to scope and plan. This was our first attempt exploring using the fee-for-service model for projects. There may be more opportunities in the future for projects using this model.